Monique DeVoe, Managing Editor

Altera has announced that its Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs are the first IEEE 754-complaint devices with hardened floating-point DSP blocks. The Arria 10 family with hardened floating-point capabilities is available now, with the Stratix 10 family to follow in 2015, along with software tools to assist migration from previous-generation Arria and [...]

The use of ARM CPUs is growing in Systems-on-Chip (SoC) platforms, as the generic ARM architecture lends well to a wide variety of systems and applications. However, while ARM processors are ideally suited for system management functions, they typically struggle with processing-intensive tasks such as imaging and advanced audio and voice communications. As the need for advanced signal processing continues to increase, application-specific Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are now being integrated with ARM cores on the die of SoCs to offload demanding data processing from the CPU in order to optimize power consumption and performance.